I totally buy it that there is no such thing as an "unidentifiable alloy." I also buy it that journalists, not being materials scientists or indeed scientists of any sort, do not know the difference between an "alloy" and "a hunk of some hard material," so at some point they wrote down "alloy" because the word sounds exotic, like something you'd find at Area 51.
This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get specific terms of art wrong, and nitpickers nitpick and clarify. I know this because I made a career of such nitpicking and clarifying once.
My point here is that nothing put forward in this article means that there's not a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how. It just means that said materials are not properly "alloys" and the journos got that word wrong, as journos often do when they're way outside their area of expertise.
> a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how
A lot stranger things have been found hidden in Vegas buildings than alien artifacts. Just a few weeks ago it started raining cheerleader uniforms in downtown Las Vegas because a demolition crew pulling down a hotel hit a sealed-off room filled with thousands of them.
It makes me wonder what it will look like when they tear down the building storing old Star Trek: The Experience junk. The UFO conspiracy theorists are going to have a great time with those photo.
You know, I saw something like this in Boston just yesterday. They are tearing down a condemned parking garage near my office; I saw a room they had started demolishing that was packed chock-full with what looks like winter clothes. Like, they had been stuffed in it as insulation or something. Some had fallen out onto the rubble below. Very strange.
Yes, agreed. I hate to say it, but this is a crap article. The point of the original NYT article was that they had something they could not identify, not that there was some new form of matter. All this consists of is a journalist (and hopefully editor) using the wrong phraseology and SA jumping on it like an eager five-year-old on the mechnical fire engine at WalMart.
SA used to have a series, I think it was called something like the "Citizen Scientist" or maybe the "Amateur Scientist". This article is a new type of journalism I've noticed taking off in the last decade or two that I'll call the "Asshole Scientist". It consists of self-righteous and assine authors taking pot-shots (some warranted, some not) at whatever cultural item is in the current zeitgeist.
It's great for gathering clicks. Nothing like a bunch of folks sitting in their living room with a smug smile on their face, scrolling through a short journalistic snack-food, feeling like they're in with the cool kids. But it doesn't do much in the way of showing people how to have reasonable public conversations. Or even how to read charitably.
Note that I'm not upset with the content of the article, just the tone. A bit of tweaking and it'd be fine. But that would defeat the purpose. This kind of article is all about tone.
What is the distinction between "material that you can't identify" and a "whole new type of matter?"
Unless something is interfering with the efforts to identify a given substance, there aren't a whole lot of options left besides it being something "new" (which is to say hitherto unknown).
It's as if somebody had been quoted saying "The UFO appeared to be surrounded by some type of brightly glowing plasma" and Scientific American were to go get the opinions of plasma physicists about whether or not this was possible with plasma.
What the material scientists are saying is that there are techniques which would allow them to identify any physical material given that our understanding of the way that they universe works is approximately correct. If a material was discovered that was unidentifiable the government would not be putting it in a warehouse, anywhere, it would be in a massive secret lab. All the people who SA interviewed would have been co-opted into joining said lab. Undergraduate education in Physics and Chemistry in the US would be grinding to a halt, NIST grants and DARPA grants would be zero for any other topic, publication and patent rates would be falling precipitously.
Why? Because such a find would be "all bets are off" everything would be up for grabs, not only would every scientist be scrambling to be involved - all the others would be encased in dark depression knowing that what they were up to was essentially worthless.
There would be questions in the UN, threats of violence against the US, allies would be sending worried missions and publicly begging for inclusion (unless they were included in which case they would be mouth shut deferential and smug in company..)
The Bomb was a game changer, everyone working on the Manhattan Project knew it, and they _still_ had spies successfully infiltrating the project and exfiltrating above-top-secret data. Some supposedly alien material wouldn't change human nature. Something that big would leak.
It did leak. Everybody "knows" the government has been experimenting on Aliens and alien technology since at least Roswell. There are even articles in the New York Times about warehouses storing alien artifacts!
That is a good point. If you were in possession of world-changing, society-breaking, panic-inducing information, how else would you prepare society for eventually hearing the full truth?
You would do it as a laughable joke over a long period of time.
That is why they stopped trying to outright hide projects like that, and instead mix the truth in tsunami of disinformation, sensationalize, crack pot theories, conspiracy, and the like so even if legitimate "Top Secret" info was leaked it could be safely dismissed as conspiracy, lies, or the newest term "fake news"
Obviously the narrative you put down makes no sense whatsoever, game theoretic and otherwise. For a better, much more realistic understanding of how intelligence agencies may react to something like this, I suggest you read Richard Heuer's psychology of intelligence analysis [1].
It's even stupider than that. The original quote was "alloys and other materials", but all the "rebuttals" are strictly about alloys in particular. They just ignored half the sentence they were nitpicking and declared the whole thing rebutted.
Yeah, if you are willing to buy that they have something stored they can't identify, this is the most logical explanation.
That said, I would still buy that there are probably almost no materials that we couldn't at least get a handle on. If they were truly incomprehensible it would likely be because they were the result of manipulating properties that we don't even know exist yet (higher dimensionality, etc, whatever other sci-fi shit), and I feel like something that sensational and world changing would be incredibly hard to cover up.
A Pentium chip would probably seem like an incomprehensible material to Alan Turing (and not just because of the awful instruction set), because even though all the materials were known at the time, the design and fabrication techniques and mind-bogglingly fine granularity and complexity of how they are combined hadn't been conceived of yet.
I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better understanding of science or a better term to describe it.
An integrated circuit is a fine grained combination of several different kinds of metal and other materials, but they're meticulously arranged and sandwiched together, not just melted together into an alloy.
At what point do you draw the line between nanotechnology and alloy, when you have the technology to 3d-print each and every atom?
>I agree the reporters probably flubbed the word "alloy" for lack of a better understanding of science or a better term to describe it.
There's no mention of what properties these materials are supposed to have, much less that the materials seem so exotic as to be beyond comprehension or a more accurate description. The original New York Times article merely mentions the "storage of metal alloys and other materials..."
Turing could see the recognizable structure and after probing it a while would quickly work out its function. He would understand all the bits and pieces and almost instantly speculate on how it was manufactured. Something alien would be more akin to showing Plato a laser pointer. Plato could spend a lifetime poking at it without learning much of anything. That's the sort of material they would need to lock up.
It depends on what how old Turing was... if it's 20 year old Turing -- an electron microscope wasn't invented yet... so no, he couldn't use one to see all of the structures of a CPU.. just the larger structures visible with an optical microscope (limited to ~200nm (Rayleigh criteron) but I dont know if they had the lens manufacturing good enough back then to reach that limit)... which may not be enough for him to figure it out.
Edit: And even when he died in the 1954, electron microscopes werent that advanced... we still needed to invent new techniques, improve our lens manufacturing, etc. There were a lot of shortcomings with it back then that limited its usage. So even in his later years, I wonder how much detail he could actually see on a modern CPU.
Of course he could, but unless you told him you were a time traveler from the future, or the Germans had vastly superior secret technology they hadn't deployed yet, it would be so unlike the computers of his time that it probably wouldn't seem plausible that it was what he knew of as a computer.
Alloys, composites, raw materials, you can identify them. If they have atoms you can identify what is in them. Now there could be weird materials that are hard to more difficult to identify. But you need a more compelling argument.
While I agree that journalists are often wrong (sometimes intentionally and sensationally so), it's 100% fair to say that the top metallurgists among us almost certainly cannot identify every extant pure metal and alloy in the entire universe.
There are other thermal, gravitational, and energetic environments in the universe that we probably haven't even begun to understand.
We are still learning how the universe appears to work.
What kind of scientist can draw a conclusion without having conducted any sort of observation? That kind of closed-mindedness is totally damning to human understanding.
The nice thing about atomic theory is that it doesn't really have that kind of hole in it. If you find, say, a sample of an island-of-stability metal you've never seen before and didn't even think was all that likely to be able to exist, you can still study and characterize it in terms of those materials we are more familiar with. You're right that we don't understand everything about the universe. But what we do understand generalizes well enough to cover the "alien alloys" case.
The alternative possibility is that there are places in the universe where fundamental physics works totally differently from here, yet materials formed there can exist here in an apparently stable state - an entire second physical system, never so much as hinted at in any of our own investigations. That would be considerably more surprising than a reporter through ignorance and haste having mischaracterized the content of a story! Reporters do that all the time.
As usual, the claim that #2 could possibly be due to pilots misinterpreting visual evidence is tossed out as a hand wavy excuse despite the fact that the cases investigated by the Pentagon are (allegedly) corroborated by targeting systems, radar and satellite images, and possibly more evidence not disclosed. The entire point of the revelations was that after bringing to bear the entire analytical arsenal of the Pentagon there is no obvious explanation remaining for these cases other that these objects indeed exist and have an unknown origin. (This doesn't mean "aliens.")
The entire story hinges on the credibility of the Pentagon officials and pilots interviewed. If they are credible with regards to the narrative around just how many resources were used to generate alternative explanations, then the media should stop building up strawmen that these specific cases were due to pilots being fooled by their visual system.
The problem is there is zero evidence of their credibility. Essentially it's an appeal to authority argument.
And the video itself doesn't show anything of the claimed behavior. No hovering over the ocean, no super fast motion, just a blob or smudge superimposed over a cloudy background as video pans around.
Which is one of many reasons we need total transparency when it comes to government. Every "state secrets" arguments falls well short when it comes to the need for the public to know everything in order to make informed decisions. Without informed consent we simply live in a police state. "National Security" is always a distant second to the need for transparency. Democracy dies behind closed doors.
> The entire point of the revelations was that after bringing to bear the entire analytical arsenal of the Pentagon there is no obvious explanation remaining ...
The articles I read seemed to indicate this “office” at the pentagon was basically a one man show and was rediculed by his peers, probably receiving little if any analytical support.
If this was real it would be classified TS and the leakers are subject to imprisonment. The US already has a ban on disclosing ordinary flight camera recordings without approval and getting the black bar treatment so how did this get out?
Don't mix narrative provided with evidence provided.
Not pilots, a pilot. All that project came up with was one pilot (Fravor) describing unusual event and none of the other three pilots involved or ship crewmen backing his story up.
Single person can see almost anything even if the observer is trained and trustworthy. As long as no other pilots collaborate the same event, there is little credibility.
Three senators earmarked millions into UFO research. Pentagon had to spend that money but they never took it seriously. Person running the project for pentagon seems untrustworthy. Now the process continues with organization whose mission includes inspirational storytelling, telepathy and electrogravitic propulsion.
My interpretation was that the origin of the material was simply unknown, which doesn't mean much.
If I wake up in the morning and there's an unexpected beer can in my yard that I did not place there, then that would be an object that arrived from an unknown origin. It doesn't make the object itself particularly mysterious, but you could have a lot of fun imagining how it got there or why it was placed there. And you can imagine that getting reported in an interesting way. Did a squirrel carry it into the yard? Did a neighbor drink a beer and toss the can into the yard? Did beer drinking aliens drop it from a space ship into the yard? Well, the latter is a fun story.
Of course it's infinitely more interesting to have a genuinely mysterious alloy or element that is inexplicable or just new and fascinating for whatever reason. I'm sure a lot of people felt that way about vanadium oxide, for example.
I could see them as hyper advanced metamaterials with effects we don't entirely understand. Materials science is still a very empirical field with lots of physical experimentation, trial and error. We can observe with SEM, x-ray etc. without fully connecting the dots to the end result. Sort of like dropping an iPhone X into the hands of a Victorian era scientist, who just dismantles it and sees it's a bunch of metal, without a chance of ever being able to reverse engineer it. It's just too advanced.
I hate articles like this. Someone makes an extraordinary claim, journalist finds some experts to insist that claim must be false based on their current understanding rather than testing the claim. This is ridiculous. Either ignore the claim, or test it. Speculation is information-free and a waste of everyone's time. Same goes for the EM drive. I don't care about hearing some random expert's opinion on why it's impossible. I want them to either ignore the story altogether, or show evidence that the proposed effect or technology doesn't work.
This is the same sort of thinking as flat earthers, except that they happen to have the status quo on their side. Science and truth aren't based on opinion or emotion, but on test results.
> based on their current understanding rather than testing the claim.
The point is that there is no claim. It is very very straight forward to identify an unknown material (figuring out how it was made, what it's for, etc., is the difficult task). If you want to claim there's an 'unknown' material, show us your XRD patterns, your EELS/XPS/NMR/EDX/PL/SIMS spectra, your AFM surfaces, your electron micrographs, atom probe tomography, any number of a hundred other characterization techniques ... then you'd actually have a claim we could have an intelligent conversation about.
At this point, there isn't even a claim that needs an expert opinion to respond to, it's all just BS.
I read it as saying it was impossible that there were materials being stored that we couldn't identify[0], not that the existence of the materials themselves was impossible. The point being that if these materials exist it should be quite straight forward to identify them, and if they're 'unknown' then that's simply because no one's taken the time in a lab to figure it out.
[0] To be charitable, I have no doubt that there exist substances in the universe we can't currently characterize. But if you restrict it to objects that you can physically store in a warehouse (that is, they're stable under ambient conditions), I have little doubt we can figure out what they are without much trouble.
I think your interpretation of the article is incorrect, but to address your point:
> I have little doubt we can figure out what they are without much trouble.
How can you be so sure of that? Have we learned pretty much all there is to know about material science and physics at this point? Do you think someone from 500 years ago could analyze a microchip or some superconducting ceramic? Do you think we could figure out a material designed by a being a million years in advance of us? The physics as we understand it in 200 years is certainly going to be magic and "impossible" by today's standards, let alone alien tech.
Of course the materials could not actually exist, or not be of alien origin. But given the premise that they are of alien origin, it's not absurd at all to think that we can't figure out the nature of the materials.
> How can you be so sure of that? ... Do you think we could figure out a material designed by a being a million years in advance of us?
It's a fair question, but I'm pretty sure we could. We have constraints: we know the object can be stored in a warehouse, we presumably can infer it can be touched, and can be seen.
Even if it were of alien origin, wondrously advanced, made of some kind of matter that fits outside our standard model of the universe, we would at least know it interacts with light, with the electromagnetic force. We understand that force very well, so we could still characterize it. And that's if it's something deeply weird; deeply strange. (And if it were really that bizarre, it'd be the discovery of the century and obscene to keep it locked up in a warehouse somewhere.)
Far more likely, it's just made up of atoms (which is what we'd expect, given its temperature and density are within the realm of 'objects that can exist on earth in a warehouse'), and then we can use all our normal techniques just fine and it's not a problem.
> Do you think someone from 500 years ago could analyze a microchip or some superconducting ceramic?
Again, to emphasize, this is a valid question -- but we've already gone past that threshold. We can see individual atoms now, so there's not much further to go when it comes to the question of what things are made of, at least to a rough approximation.
However, the next question would be "can we make it?" and the answer to that is very different. If someone gave us some electronics from the future, we could still find out what it's made from quite easily. Understanding how it works and how to re-create it would be vastly more difficult, and possibly beyond us. But this is true of the past too; there were ways of making steel and concrete in the distant past that we've long lost the knowledge of how to make.
> We can see individual atoms now, so there's not much further to go when it comes to the question of what things are made of.
That may be true but also seems like a strong assumption and doesn't fit with our current trajectory of understanding. A paradigm shift in physics which replaces fundamental notions, such as the nature of fields, could make the current understanding become seem a rough approximation just like relativity did to Newtonian mechanics.
How can you test something that doesn't exist? Where are these samples? Why can't ufo researchers produce anything to from any alien sighting to test that isn't a known alloy/substance?
This idea that we have a database that covers all possibilities for anything that would qualify as alien is delusional. It's like Neatherandals claiming that they have a complete database for hard things, and it contains exactly two entries: rock and stick. If they somehow stumbled across an iPhone, and ran a few tests, they would decide it is a rock (since it can skip across water - just like other flat rocks). In the very near future we will have complex dynamic alloys that do not fit neatly into any database because their characteristics will be change depending on the surrounding conditions. This is by a species that can't even build a space elevator. Who knows what is possible for a species capable of interstellar travel.
Quite simply, x-ray diffraction tells you the distribution of electrons in the unit cell of the alloy. So you just put an sample into your spectrometer and it will print out the chemical elements and how they are assembled. And even if there is another island of stability of super heavy elements or something like that, it will still just tell you the charge of the nucleus. So this side of quite literally magic, as in all of chemistry of the last 150 or so years fails catastrophically, there is no possibility of having an alloy sitting in a warehouse and not knowing exactly what it is.
What if there are no electrons, because there are no atoms?
The suggestion that all these alleged weird alien materials are “alloys” is just a placeholder for “looks and acts metallic, therefore made of metals.”
But if we happened to be dealing with real alien tech, that’s a naive and unscientific assumption. We already have people thinking about how to build programmable matter with variable properties, and it’s a fair bet we’ll have working examples within 50-100 years.
And there is no possibility that conventional x-ray diffraction will reveal how that kind of matter works.
Assume for a second this is real alien tech. No atoms, programmable matter, literal magic, whatever.
Why would this be in a warehouse of a $22 million (i.e. super small potatoes) government project? It would be the biggest budget and highest secrecy project on the books.
So you're saying that if the number were, say, $220 billion, you would believe that it's a real alien tech, but you don't believe it at $22 million? I don't understand.
If so, you're logically entangling an arbitrary funding number reported in the article, with the idea that perhaps some new material (or alternative particle physics) could exist.
If alien visitation were real (a huge IF), this wouldn’t have been the first project started to investigate it. Most likely there would be deeply secret and entrenched organizations around this in the government, which would also explain why this program was shut down without explanation despite “much progress”.
You're assuming "unit cell" is a meaningful concept for these materials. Can x-ray diffraction completely characterize, say, a quasicrystalline structure? Moreover, even if you can tell what it's made of, that doesn't necessarily tell you how it was made or how it works.
Well, there are other techniques for anything that is not a crystal, and they are similarly developed as x-ray diffraction, if nothing else, take an atomic force microscope and identify each individual atom directly.
> that doesn't necessarily tell you how it was made or how it works.
Absolutely, there may be materials were we don't have the slightest idea how they are made or how some property arises. But my point is, that the analysis techniques are at a level were it is pretty much guaranteed that an expression like "unknown alloy" is pretty much just clickbait, we know a great deal of anything that is made out of atoms a few days after a sample showed up in a laboratory.
"Identify each atom individually" won't scale very far for complex materials. In short, I think it's unwarrantedly optimistic to assume that our current lab techniques, optimized for natural and human-fabricated materials, will immediately figure out (hypothetically) alien technology. No assumption is completely safe; even "made of atoms" is not guaranteed. Probable, but not guaranteed.
It is possible that there are other stable particles besides the ones we know now (like protons, neutrons, electrons, photons, neutrinos, etc). And maybe they can form stable arrangements which are not atoms, but which can still interact with ordinary matter. In that case you could have a material that was not made of atoms.
I don't think a lump of such material is in a warehouse in Nevada, but maybe it exists somewhere in the universe.
An atom is a particular type of arrangement of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If something is not made of protons, neutrons, and electrons in that particular arrangement, it's not made of atoms, by definition.
We already know for a fact that there are units of matter smaller than protons/neutrons/electrons. As such, x-ray diffraction is obviously not sufficient to analyze all matter.
We already know for a fact that there are units of matter smaller than protons/neutrons/electrons.
Yes, and everything we know about them suggests that they either:
Decay almost immediately when encountered in the wild
Immediately clump together with other particles to form larger units
Do not interact with normal matter
Etc.
IOW, there's little or no reason to think that any kind of stable material, anything that you could store in a warehouse as a clump of "stuff", is made without atoms.
If it is possible, as far as I know, that would be deep into "entirely new physics that violates a lot of central tenets of our current thinking". So yeah, that could happen, but you have to ask "is it likely"?
Of course it's unlikely. Being visited by an alien race is, in fact, highly unlikely.
That's not the point, though, is it? This article said "experts say that creating materials we don't understand is impossible." Not unlikely - impossible.
An alien race with the capability to visit earth would have a grasp of physics that we obviously do not, otherwise we would be visiting habitable planets right now. That's the whole point. The argument this article puts forth is just as silly as the young-earth creationist argument that "abiogenesis is incredibly unlikely, so it must be God". Or in this case "we don't understand it, so it must be impossible".
"Alloy" isn't the correct term when it comes to potential alien metallurgy. We can easily identify which elements are present in a sample. With a bit more effort we can identify the structure. That doesn't mean we can replicate the exact mix and structure.
Some metals don't mix. They mix as liquids but as they cool they crystallize differently, sometimes separating from each other. So an "alien alloy" could be a mix that was formed by some advanced tech (zero-g fabrication, strong magnetic fields etc) that we cannot replicate. Try getting a perfect crystalline mix of steel and neon. Maybe it is a miracle substance. But we don't know because we cannot fabricate such structures. If that showed up in a lab it would be "alien".
A few years ago any jet engine would contain "alien alloys" in the sense that nobody could have replicated the single-crystal structures now common in blades.
Obviously there could be something we can't analyze.
But it would need to be based on a different structure than atoms, so not some new element or alloy but something completely different. Say some hard matter based on some condensed unknown field.
This sounds highly unprobable. But if true, this would have implications about all of physics, not just some new material science.
Does it appear manufactured or natural in elemental distribution? yes : no
If the answer is yes to the first two, then yes, the alloy is indeed "mysterious". Simple as that. This article didn't debunk anything. It just corrected a wording technicality.
After reading that it sounds like they just haven't been able to reproduce the process of making it, not that it's an alloy that they don't understand the composition of.
Understanding the composition is just the first step of duplicating the process that made something. It can be as simple as melting two bars of different metals to etching elaborate patterns through complicated physical and chemical processes.
There seems to be an easily-composable fire retardant substance that can be made from household materials and that's been discovered several times by tinkerers over the years.
Could it be we're confusing what an alloy (or some composite) is made of vs _how_ it's made?
For example (and it's just an example for the sake of discussion), many here couple probably analyze the skin of a stealth bomber and identify what it's made of. But that still leaves how it was made.
It seems reasonable to think we have things - which could be non ET - that we can't quite figure out and don't want anyone else to know either.
Obviously not a popular idea for HN but certainly not impossible.
What does it actually mean by "unknown alloy"? All periodic table metal/metalloid elements can be extracted and detected. Even a standard high school chemistry texts include these processes with wet experiments to be done in the labs. Do they mean new element? If that is the case then those elements must be radioactive. Or do they actually mean "known alloy with new electromagnetic/crystalline properties"? Still it does not make any sense.
If it exists, it's probably some facility where broken debris from research aircraft are stored. Edwards is always testing something, and when something breaks, it gets studied.
I once worked in a hydraulics R&D facility which had a scanning electron microscope. Parts which failed were examined to find out why. Their screen usually showed broken edges of something under high magnification.
Let me break this down into a much simpler and more direct argument.
We have ways to very reliably identify the elemental composition of any material you can imagine. That doesn't tell us how to manufacture that material, but it does tell us what it's made out of. These are extremely robust techniques (x-ray diffraction and x-ray fluorescence) that work on anything made out of atoms.
The claim, any claim, of an "unidentifiable alloy" is simply not credible without presenting x-ray fluorescence and x-ray diffraction data to back that up.
It is infinitely more likely that no one examining these materials had such instruments available to them, so they just sort of shrugged and said "I dunno what it is" which then got telephone-gamed into "unidentifiable alloys!" along the way. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This is an extraordinary claim with no evidence. So it is not a credible claim.
Given that we discover new elements[1] from time to time, it's not impossible that we'd discover a new alloy. However, something about this story is fishy and is likely being blown out of proportion.
It's a common trope that there exists a "God of the gaps" where we fill in our lack of understanding with God, ghosts, or aliens. If a door slams in your house, it's seen as a ghost, rather than pressure equalizing between rooms. This feels like an case where we attach our uncertainty to an explanation before we have enough data to form a viable hypothesis.
> Given that we discover new elements[1] from time to time, it's not impossible that we'd discover a new alloy.
It should still be relatively simple to identify each of the elements in it by it's atomic number. Our periodic table is complete to the 7:th row, and any unknown (un-named) element with a higher atomic number would be very likely to have a very short half life.
This biggest qualm I have about this article is that it attempts to disprove alien tech using human tech. Any sufficiently advanced beings would appear to us to be magical of sorts since they would have mastered elements of the universe we don't even know exists. You cant simply say well since we've seen these combinations of letters in the atomic alphabet we can therefore deduce the meaning of all combinations. What if they discovered a noble gas in the compound? (kryptonium perhaps) It would completely change the way we view chemistry.
> it attempts to disprove alien tech using human tech
Not even that, it just goes babbling “impossible! Impossible!” - no trch nor science involved, they basically asked two random scientists if they believed in aliens, the answer was as predictable as pointless
I dug around a bit and it's a 3d layer printed nano-composite of very high purity bismuth and magnesium doped with some other trace elements and a crystal structure that they think indicates it was grown in a zero-G environment. Apparently even the wiring is baked in. I mean if we didn't know how processors were made, they would look like magic under the microscope as well. But I guess they genuinely don't understand how the layering was achieved.
What they say they don't know is how to manufacture it.
I would hazard a guess that someone with access to that info wouldn't provide a source were they to leak it, also that someone with access to a source wouldn't leak it in such a public way or on HN.
Regardless, this explanation is now head-canon, regardless of whatever facts or otherwise may present themselves.
Problem is I didn't find anything reputable. Most of the sources I got was tinged with "woo woo" UFO lore. But a googling will show you. Also found a Joe Rogan video with the Delonge guy.
For heaven's sake, we're not completely sure how Damascus steel was made, and that was done by humans hundreds of years ago, with thousands of samples lying around the world. And we're just supposed to assume that because we've tried all the combinations of alloys we can think of, there are no other possibilities?
Have some imagination. Think about nano-layering and quasicrystals, to say nothing of stable-island heavy nuclei and other exotic forms of matter not ruled out by physics as we know it. Come lecture me about impossibilities when you've finished solving solid-state physics, mkay?
Those aren't technically "alloys"? Fine, but that's a useless nitpick in the face of the actual question under consideration. Reading through the mistakes of science-illiterate journalists and politicians should be a reflex by now; you don't get any points for proving you have a better technical vocabulary than they do.
This is different. Any example of "Damascus steel" that you can point to you can use an XRF device on to figure out the actual alloy composition. That doesn't tell you exactly how to make it, it just tells you what elements it's made out of.
How is it different? You're practically making my point for me: knowing the composition doesn't mean you understand a material in any meaningful way. If the people supposedly running these warehouses are honest, we have to assume they've done all the obvious tests and are still confused.
Just to belabor the point some more, we didn't know until recently that damascus steel contains carbon nanotubes (probably derived from plant material). Was an XRF machine ever going to pick that up? Not in any detail, I'm guessing.
What point are you trying to make here? Again, the claim of an "unidentifiable alloy" without XRF data backing it up is simply not credible. Period. Worse, the claim here is of an "unidentifiable alloy" without any evidence whatsoever. That is not credible.
The issue of being able to reproduce an alloy or material is an entirely separate one from being able to identify what it's made out of. Nobody calls Damascus steel an "unidentifiable alloy". We know what it is, a type of steel, we know what it's made out of. Whether or not we can manufacture something with identical properties is irrelevant to whether or not we can identify it.
This whole "unidentifiable alloys" thing is a lot of meaningless speculation that hinges on a throwaway phrase with zero evidence backing it up. Show me the XRF data then we'll have a discussion. Until then it's just a bunch of hot air.
Aren't there Carbon configurations that we wouldn't have been able to identify 20 years ago? We would have been able to identify them as Carbon, but not accounted for their unique properties. Maybe it's not completely far-fetched.
I’m not sure what the initial claim was about this material, but it could be “exotic” even if it is identifiable.
If you sent a sample of carbon nanotubes to the 1950’s, they’d say “this is carbon”. That doesn’t mean the sample wasn’t exotic to them and hard for them to reproduce or understand.
An “alien material” or “alien alloy” would be one where we just didn’t understand how it’s made, even if we can see perfectly how it’s structured and what it consists of.
Depends (on the CNT's) If you sent it to them anonymously in the post I agree, it would probably have been binned. But if you said "this is special and interesting, can you tell me why and here's $100k to do the work" then my guess is that about three days later you would get a visit from a red eyed and overwhelmingly excited person who would shout at you about allotropes of carbon that could be conductive.
Then you'd get the "so how do we make them long enough to use and have a reliable process that costs in" discussion, and I think that you'd be there for about 70 years. Sadly, maybe longer...
Sad to see this (clickbait) story come from SI. No substantive refutation of the evidence, just speculation and the truism that atomic components of any alloy can be identified, which of course they can. But alloys -and nanomaterials- can and do have extremely interesting properties independent of their chemical composition and these are often non-obvious. SI completely glosses over that point.
I read it as an extended argument for concluding that there is no such thing as an 'unknown alloy.' I have seen this as a tactic to pressure people to provide more details.
Simply writing "we don't believe them when they say this" doesn't carry as much weight as "we don't believe them because x, y, and z."
There is a very simple explanation for why the alloys are so mysterious.
Harry Reid was able to get the program funded, and directed most of the $22M in spending to one of his closest backers, Robert Bigelow so he could build a fancy warehouse. If that fancy warehouse wasn't storing super valuable alien artifacts it just looks like Reid filling the pockets of a close friend with government monies, and people might think Bigelow might be laundering that money to pay back to Reid after his retirement.
Since both of these upstanding citizens are known to have such high ethics that can't be possible, clearly the warehouse was full of priceless alien stuff. We can scientifically examine these alloys right now, except Reid agreed to cancel the program, because of deficits? or Harry's retirement accounts were fully funded.
But we also have an esteemed government director who can corroborate all of this, Luis Elizondo. He has no reason to make up sensationalistic stories, he's too busy helping Tom Delonge convince backers to fund the "To The Stars Academy of Arts & Science" to research alien stuff, and which supposedly is contractually obligated to pay Tom $100,000 a year once funded. What it's going to pay Luis is no-ones business.
Yep, completely on the level. Can't understand why these scientists are so skeptical.
While I don't doubt that Harry Reid is as corrupt a politician and as expert at funneling money to his cronies as, say, the late Robert Byrd was; there are A LOT easier and quieter ways of making it happen.
Especially for a sum as small as $22 million. Even county-level politicians can make that amount of money disappear without a trace and without leaving behind a warehouse and a paper trail.
To play the other side: What we have in the linked article is a couple of people who have never seen the objects in question stating categorically that they don't exist, or are ordinary. I'd believe the skeptics more if they'd at least seen the objects. But it's just a couple of guys several thousand miles away second-guessing some other guys with actual access to the objects.
> I'd believe the skeptics more if they'd at least seen the objects.
So your standard for proof is that someone said A but provided no proof, yet those who are skeptical about A's truth aren't to be trusted because they... Weren't provided proof to refute?!
I dunno, I read the article and the "guy a thousand miles away" gave pretty damn good reasoning why it'd be short work to identify and categorize "alien alloys".
Or do you have an actual argument as to why these materials couldn't be readily identified and studied by competent physicists using well known technology?
Structure is the basis for 'invisibility cloaks', materials with small-scale structures which confer optical properties not found in the same unstructured bulk materials. [1]
Another example of where structure confers strange properties on elements (not alloys) is light emission from indirect-gap materials like silicon. Make silicon particles small enough and you can get light emission that you can't from bulk silicon. See quantum dots [2] and other similar structures.
That’s the issue, which really comes down to the word “Alloy” in this case. If you believe there’s a chance that the word alloy was used instead of a more accurate and technical term, then your points definitely stand. If they really meant alloy though? I’d tend to side it’s the article. I mean you can imagine some strange and exotic materials maintained by some kind of alien power source, but lose the power and the material should decay in some fashion. For a purely fictional example see things like degenerate matter held in some kind of sci-fi stasis.
If it is Earthish temperature, it going to be made of normal atoms (i.e. elements we have identified on the periodic table) and mass spectrometry and X-ray crystallography would be common tools that physicists would use to identify its molecular structures. And yes, highly advanced nanotechnology uses regular old atoms, as far as Science can see today.
Just think about what you are saying. Even if you don't like Reid, you should know he didn't get to where he is by being an idiot.
Does it make sense to make your most SHADY kickback deal based on Aliens??? Something that will get TONS of press coverage even with nothing fraudulent going on.
If Reid was looking for a quid-pro-quo, he would be working with the Mega Resorts on the strip (MGM, Caesars, and even Republican Steve Wynn). His decisions could massively benefit them, and sitting as an honorary member of their board could be profitable.
When you go to rob the bank you drive the easiest to forget, most common looking, plain colored mid-sized sedan. You don't drive an Ice Cream Truck blasting death metal.
> Does it make sense to make your most SHADY kickback deal based on Aliens?
Oh I can just see it now.
"Don't tell a soul, it's off the books. This is..." The Senator looked around nervously and began to whisper, "top secret alien technology we're dealing with here."
>If Reid was looking for a quid-pro-quo, he would be working with the Mega Resorts on the strip (MGM, Caesars, and even Republican Steve Wynn). His decisions could massively benefit them, and sitting as an honorary member of their board could be profitable.
That makes for a great story until you consider the fact that bigelow is rich and $22 million is small change to the billionaire set that Reid has had on speed dial for years. Enormously elaborate schemes to launder relatively small amounts of money are only plausible to people who think $22 million is a vast fortune.
I can't speak for everyone, of course, but I know a few self-made HNWI's and you might be surprised just how stingy they can be. I've seen one of the richest guys I know send a bill back in a restaurant because using a different rewards card they could get 15% instead of 10% off their meal. And we're not talking a huge bill either, maybe $60.
Most of the guys I know could take first class everywhere and not even notice but nope - economy all the way, and UberX to the airport. Not all rich guys blow hundreds of thousands on private jets. I get the feeling that the more you struggled to earn it, the more you watch every penny.
And the richest guy I know (capital-B) is far more concerned with upholding and preserving his family legacy than with ostentatious displays of wealth. It really weighs on him. Sure, he's not hurting, and life is pretty good, but a baller he ain't. Shows up at the office at 9am just like all us other schmucks. Hell, he shares an office!
Those guys you see living large on instagram and what not aren't universal or, as far as I know, even typical.
>What an absurd argument that a guy worth $200MM would not spend his time and money on a $22MM deal.
The argument is that a 200MM+ guy wouldn't spend his time on such an elaborate and risky 22M deal that's sure to get a lot of attention even if it was fully legit.
Your straw-man version is indeed absurd, though, I'll give you that.
>So you telling me if your Net worth is $1MM, you wont bother with $100k deal?
You seem to have a keen eye for missing the substance, since you've missed the gist of the argument twice.
And, no, even with $1MM net worth, I wouldn't bother with a $100k deal if it was risky, illegal, and sure to get attention, including of the press.
And the tendency to risk everything for such 0,1*X more falls as one's X net worth rises, so it's even less probable than someone at 220M would risk it for $22M, since they have much less need for an additional 10% boost and much more to potentially lose.
As for whether I'm poor or not, that's not something you'd know -- besides it being an ad hominem and rude to boot.
risky and illegal? I don't see them in jail.. or in any sort of legal trouble.
As of getting attention, I'm sure if they got all this attention and no legal recourse, I bet any businessman in town would love to do business with both of them!
Except Bigelow is a well known alien crank. Occam's Razor suggests that it's a politician throwing a rich guy a bone for his pet fantasy (with taxpayer money, of course, though it's really the recognition rather than the money that matters here), expecting more personal support later.
As a former scientist well practiced in x-ray diffraction it has been really fun watching these blatant flasehoods spread. We have mastered identifying the atomic structure of materials.
Sadly spreading these claims is how these programs self propegate. Luckily they don't do much real damage other than misleading the public and wasting government funding.
It's not in the spirit of this site to use someone else's name for your account. Since this account isn't that old and doesn't have much of a history, it's probably best if you just make a new one. In the meantime I'm going to ban this one. If that's a problem, let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
The best solution would be to rename the account, but we don't have that implemented yet.
You don't think a civilization with sufficiently advanced nanotech could fabricate a material that would flummox x-ray diffraction? That seems a bit short-sighted to me. Our imaging and composition technologies are not sufficiently advanced to determine exact structures of anything - we still have to include many assumptions in order for the data to make sense.
For x-ray diffraction in particular, we assume all materials are made from atoms. However, we all know that quarks and more exist, so you don't think it's possible that an advanced race could make a material that skips that atom part?
However, we all know that quarks and more exist, so you don't think it's possible that an advanced race could make a material that skips that atom part?
This sounds like pure sci-fi to me. AFAIK, everything we know about physics suggests that there are no stable substances made up of sub-atomic particles in a way that "skips the atom part". If that were possible, it would be in the realm of "entirely new physics".
Not to say that it's not possible of course... you don't know what you don't know and all that. But the Standard Model seems to be pretty firmly grounded and I haven't seen anything to suggest that it allows for such a thing. Personally, my bayesian prior on this being possible would be awfully close to 0 right now.
Close to but definitely non-zero IMO. The quark model has been around for less than 100 years; push that out to, say, 1000 year time-scale, and I could certainly see it developing entirely new physics compared to what we now know. The Standard Model is well-founded, but explaining the things it currently doesn't (gravity/dark energy/neutrino masses etc.) could well require it.
> However, we all know that quarks and more exist, so you don't think it's possible that an advanced race could make a material that skips that atom part?
Quarks combine via the strong force into baryons, the most common of which are particles that form the nucleus of atoms and anti-atoms, and mesons, which are unstable and immediately decay into electrons, photons, neutrinos, etc.
Of the baryons, protons are stable, neutrons less-so, and the rest decay immediately. Perhaps there is a configuration of non-nucleon quarks that bond together into a kind of stable matter that we have yet to discover, but it seems more likely to me that if (and that's a big "if") there were exotic matter in a warehouse in Las Vegas, it would consist of novel alloys or other such materials.
I did not realize we fully understood the physics of the universe in a grand unified theory, and furthermore are capable of understanding ALL configuration of physical phenomena that are capable of interacting with solid natural matter.
That is awesome; I did not realize we were so perfect, so smart, to have it all figured out, and that science is done learning more.
This is kind of a ridiculous article. The main point seems to be that some scientists (who have nothing to do with this supposed UFO research) say that all known alloys are known, and that it would be surprising to find one that couldn’t be figured out.
I totally believe that we could identify any normal alloy, but what about more far-out kinds of materials? Humans have already experimented with metamaterials, weird composites made of many different kinds of constituents layered or interposed in various ways, materials with embedded electronic or even "smart" computational capabilities, etc.
Now imagine what a more advanced civilization might be capable of producing. I'm imagining a composite with embedded "smart" programmable behaviors that is 3d printed at the atomic scale. Every single atom is positioned intentionally to yield "smart matter" with incredible strength or other really exotic capabilities.
I can imagine it being difficult to identify or characterize such a thing without destructive testing, and if we did have such a sample we'd probably be very reluctant to do that.
This happens in the press /all the time/. Journos get specific terms of art wrong, and nitpickers nitpick and clarify. I know this because I made a career of such nitpicking and clarifying once.
My point here is that nothing put forward in this article means that there's not a building in Vegas with some kinds of materials that have strange properties and we don't know where they're from or who made them or how. It just means that said materials are not properly "alloys" and the journos got that word wrong, as journos often do when they're way outside their area of expertise.